Fêtes, Bruges, Brussels, & Disneyland Paris

If anyone ever wants to make the argument that being an exchange student isn't all fun and games, I wouldn't recommend looking at my past two weekends.

Two Fridays ago (18th of January), a friend from school named Mathieu invited me to a surprise birthday party for another school friend named Jeremie.  Jeremie's mom got a private room in a nice bar for us.

For the first twenty minutes or so, everyone just stood around saying hi and waiting for Jeremie to arrive.  He was told that he was being taken out to eat for his birthday until "surprise!", it turned out that all of his friends were waiting for him.  We ate subs, drank beer, and ate cake.  Great party!

Birthday boy in the middle

Oppa Gangnam Style!

One of the funnest parts of the night was the drinking game we played.  You had to put a deck of cards on top of a glass and blow on the cards.  You pass the glass around in a circle and the person who blows the last card has to drink.  Somehow I started off amazingly.  I would manage to blow off every card except for the last one, hence no one wanted to be to the left of me:)  After having a few more drinks though, I began to blow off the entire deck so I had to be more careful.

The following Wednesday, my new friend Simon (remember: that's "see-MOHn") invited me to a pizzeria with him and some of his friends after school.  It was really good, and it was just a few minutes from my house by foot.  After that we went to a bar in Marche and did what I tend to do all day at school - play Danish.

Friday afternoon, I went to the bar again with some friends after school.  We just talked and hung out for a few hours until about 6:30 when we left for dinner.  Going to Bruges the next day and Disneyland the day after, I knew I would need all the sleep I could get so I called it a night pretty early and went to sleep.

Bruges was definitely one of the nicest cities I've seen in Belgium so far, sometimes referred to as the Venice of Belgium.

I woke up around 7:30 on Saturday to catch the train.  I went with my friend Will, his host brother, and his host sister, who are both university students in Louvain-la-Neuve.  We took the train to Brussels to meet up with Will's host sister's friend and then went to Starbucks while we waited for our train to Bruges.  We must have been going to more of the touristy part of Belgium because we heard a lot of people on the train speaking English.

One of the first things we did when we got there was climb the well known Belfry of Bruges.  It was 6€ to climb and there are 366 steps.

Afterwards, we got lunch at a friterie. Then we proceeded to check out more of Bruges, including many of the shops and two cathedrals.

We finished up our time in Bruges with a beer at the bar.  It was fun, we attempted to tell each other jokes.  Will and I spent about twenty minutes explaining, "Why did the blonde get fired from the m&m factory? She threw out all the w's", but they got it eventually. Afterwards we walked back to the train station.  We had to transfer trains again in Brussels, so we got waffles and walked around the city for a while we waited.

After a great day in Bruges, I got home at about 10:30, just in time to get a few hours of sleep before waking up for Disneyland at 3 AM.

The trip to Disneyland Paris was organized by AFS, but you were allowed to bring guests so my host brother and his friend Charlotte came with me.  We all road a double-decker bus to get there. Charlotte's parents picked us up and drove us to a small town outside of Charleroi to catch it.  The bus ride was probably about 4 hours total, and it went by pretty fasting as I rotated back and forth from talking and sleeping.

It was weird for me because usually going to Disney means you'd get too sweaty if you wore pants, while here I was cold even with three layers.

This was the "Italian" restaurant we ate at for lunch

We found a stamp of the Belgian flag on the ground

A lot of the rides and roller coasters were kinda small, but Space Mountain was really good.  Plus you have fun no matter what you're doing as long as you're with the right people:)

We left Disney around 8 PM.  On the bus ride home, we played cards, told ghost stories, and slept.  Charlotte's parents picked us up again in Charleroi and we got home around 2 AM.  My host mom was nice enough to just let us stay home the next day.

My goal for the end of the year is to have made it to at least 10 countries in my life.  So far I've been to the US, Canada, Mexico, Belgium, Germany, and France (I wouldn't count Switzerland since I never left the airport).  I'm going on a class trip in April to Croatia and Italy, and then I could easily make it to Luxembourg or the Netherlands too.

I have a lot coming up the next couple weeks: this weekend we have our mid-stay orientation (this year is going by crazy fast), my birthday is a week from tomorrow, and then we have a weeklong vacation the following week for a European festival called Carnival (basically the same thing as Mardi Gras).  I haven't actually been to the city of Paris other than going to Disneyland, so I might be going there for Carnival with some friends for a few nights and sleep at a youth hostel.  Stay tuned for more!

Keaton

Nouvelle classe

Well I finally got around to changing classes from quatrième (sophomore year) to sixième (senior year) and I would say things have already been going a lot better!

(Here are some pictures of the campus from the school website)

Last Monday was the first stay of school after Christmas break and my first day starting class in sixième.  I went to school early to meet with the vice principal and make my new schedule.  I have most of the same courses that I had before Noël, except I started taking Spanish and I also have fewer hours of the courses I had before.  Just incase anyone wants to know:

Monday (part of the reason I signed up for Spanish was just because my Monday schedule was so pathetic)
1) -
2) -
3) English
4) -
5) Spanish
6) -
7) Gym
8) -
9) English

Tuesday
1) Geographie
2) History
3) Math
4) Math
5) Religion
6) -
7) -
8) -
9) Science

Wednesday (half-day)
1) French
2) French
3) Math
4) History

Thursday
1) French
2) Geographie
3) Science
4) Science
5) -
6) Socioeconomics
7) Socioeconomics
8) Gym
9) English

Friday
1) -
2) French
3) Socioeconomics
4) Socioeconomics
5) Math
6) -
7) Spanish
8) English
9) Religion

The first day was weird because it was kind of like starting all over again - new classes, new building, new people, and new teachers (other than my English and French teachers).  Once again I was the new American exchange student, so a lot of people come up to talk to you. The only difference was that this time I had already been in Belgium for four months so I was actually able to respond to people, rather than giving an awkward smile and saying "sorry, I don't understand" five times a minute.  There's one other exchange student in my grade from New York named Ashley who I ate lunch with the day before.  She's really nice!  The first day, my gym teacher was absent and my English teacher was gone during the afternoon so I just went home after lunch.

The second day was my first full day of school.  I stayed in my homeroom for lunch this day to meet some of my classmates.  Most students are very nice and inviting!  I spent my lunch hour playing a card game with a group of about six people.  At first I had no idea was I was doing, but I got the hang of it after a while;)  Usually I have three hours of break on Tuesday afternoons, but some of the students taking English class went to see a play put on English Theatre Company, a group that puts on plays for English language students.  It was some comedy play about Shakespeare called Halcoyn Days which was extremely cheesy (but I admit, a little funny).

A little while after school on Monday, my host mom called me downstairs to say hi to one of her friends that stopped by.  She brought her daughter with her who surprised me by introducing herself with pretty good English.  It turns out that a couple of years ago she was an exchange student in Michigan!  She lived in a small town outside of Kalamazoo called Constantine.  Somehow she didn't even make it to Grand Rapids that year, but she did see Lake Michigan when she went to South Haven (to any exchange students who may be reading and have never heard of any of those cities, screw you).  Anyways, my own mom's friend owns a friterie (basically local fast food joints that are very popular in Belgium and specialize in French fries) outside of my town so we drove there after school on Wednesday and my host mom bought me lunch.  It was really good!

My cold was getting really bad on Wednesday so I just stayed in bed all day Thursday and watched Jurassic Park (which is getting rereleased in 3D this spring!!)

Finally Friday was my was my last day of school.  Three of my new classmates invited me out for lunch with them so I went and had a good time.  After school, I was ready to go home and rest after a long week, when some of my classmates asked me if I wanted to go to a bar with them.  You bet I was down.  As soon as we got there, a bunch of other people from school started coming in.  It turns out that they all get together every Friday after school.  The bar was pretty small and we ended up filling up the whole thing, so anyone else that came went to the bar across the street.  Before long, everyone left to the other bar except for me and about seven other guys, so we had a few more beers before eventually joining the others.

We got to the other bar and I sat down at a long table with about twelve people.  I was invited to sleepover at someone's house with some other guys so I was planning on doing that.  Well all the Belgians seem to like to drink in pace with one another.  What I shouldn't have done was try to keep up with their pace.  I had a few too many beers for an American so I decided to go home early and sleep and told them I would stay longer the next time:)

I still don't speak fantastic French, but my French has gotten 100 times better since I got here four months ago.  I couldn't imagine during the first few months that I would be able to eventually go out and converse almost entirely in French for the night!  I'm curious to know how well I'll speak it when I leave in July.

On Saturday my friend Will invited me to go to a party in a town called Habay-la-Neuve.  It was a party that his liaison invited him to.  Here are some photos taken with my crappy iPod camera:

Originally our friend Evan was gonna come was gonna come with us and then we were gonna walk to his house after the party to sleep, but Evan got sick and couldn't come.  Evan's host family was nice enough to let us sleep over anyway, but that mean we had to find it ourselves- it wasn't easy.  We left the party at 2 and started walking.  We had to rely on  the directions that Evan texted us, which wasn't easy because apparently street signs aren't all that common in Belgium, so we started off walking in the wrong direction for a half hour.  After spending another half hour walking back to where we were, we asked a few more people which way to go and eventually the directions started making sense.  We finally got there around 5 AM.  I had never been so happy to climb into bed in my life!  Neither of us were well prepared to walk around for three hours in the snow in the middle of the night below freezing temperature, but hey, it builds character.

Evan's host family has a cabin-like thing in their backyard so we slept inside of that- it was cool.  The next day we mostly just lazed around the house watching the movies we could find, like Shrek and Kung Fu Panda.  Evan's parents sent him boxes of Mac & Cheese through the mail and he shared some with us.  It was amazing! Best food in the the world and first time I had it since I got here.

Now I'm just going through my second week of school in sixième.  I was feeling pretty homesick at one point today, but for the most part I'm holding up well.

Hope everyone else is doing alright too,
Keaton

Germany / Allemagne / Deutschland

Since I last blogged, I spent four nights in Germany and New Years Eve in Brussels!  Here's what happened:

On Thursday the 27th, I took the train from Liège, Belgium to Cologne (Köln), Germany.  It was a pretty short train ride, lasting barely even an hour (not to say it came cheap, hence a one way ticket was about 34€ or ($45)).

I arrived at the train station in Cologne at about 4 PM, greeted by Jonas, his sister, and his mom.  We said hi, hopped into the car, and headed to their apartment about a half hour away in Sankt Augustin.

When we first got there, Jonas showed me around their apartment.  His mom and sister slept on the main floor and he had the basement to himself.  It was attractive and good sized, I forgot to take pictures of it though.

His mom is a good cook and made us made spaghetti the first night!  Most of the food we ate wasn't distinctly Germany, except for schnitzel of course.  Jonas' girlfriend came over for dinner, and then we just rested at home for a while until we left for a party.

We took the local train (5 minutes by foot), that runs every 10 minutes, to the party.  Thankfully Germans tend to be very good with English so I was able to socialize with a lot of people. You had to be 18 to stay past midnight, so unfortunately I wasn't cool enough to stay very late.  But I was tired anyways from the nature of traveling.

The next day, Jonas, Emily (Jonas' sister), and I took the train to Cologne.  The first thing you notice when you step outside of the train station is the Cologne Cathedral, or "The Dome".  It was incredible, definitely the biggest cathedral I'd ever seen.  You are often allowed inside of it.  As we were leaving, we tried to get in as people were exiting from a mass service but the priest wouldn't let anyone else in.

We walked around in downtown Cologne, which seemed like a giant shopping mall on an endless street.  Still pretty cool though.  I ended up buying an iPod Touch there because my old one officially wouldn't make sound anymore.

On Saturday the 29th, Jonas, Emily, and I woke up early to take the train to Wuppertal, Germany where Jonas' dad lives.  His dad picked us up at the train station and took us to a bakery at a German grocery store.  He was nice enough to buy us pastries for breakfast.  After that, went to Jonas' dad's house to have eggs and orange juice with the pastries he bought us.  Jonas' dad and step-mom were extremely friendly, even if his step-mom made a wise crack at me for not having a "clean, British accent".

Once again exhausted from traveling and lack of sleep, I went upstairs to take a two hour nap before Jonas' dad drove us to downtown Wuppertal.  Wuppertal is well-known for having a unique hanging train for public transportation.  It's several kilometers long and we got to ride it nearly all the way down the city and back, getting off once to see the Christmas festivals and to explore the city a little better.

While we were downtown, Jonas' step-mom was making a cake for us.  We were welcomed back with a cherry cheesecake served with coffee.  They were awfully generous.  Finally Jonas' dad drove us back to his mom's house where we got to enjoy some homemade pizzas.

The following day, exhausted, we slept in until 2 PM.  We got ready, ate breakfast, jumped in the car, and headed for Bonn, the capital of West Germany until Germany's unification in 1990.

Beethoven's birth home 

 After four long months, I finally got Starbucks

I woke up around 10:30 the next morning, had breakfast, and Jonas' mom drove us to the train station in Cologne where we said our goodbyes.  Germany was definitely one of my highlights of the year.

I got home from Germany on New Years Eve.  As soon as I got home, I slept for a few hours and then headed off to Brussels.  I met up with my friends Cameron and Callie on the way.  When we first got to Brussels, we started off by going to a couple of different bars, but everything was pretty full and there wasn't much room to sit, so we left the bar, got fries, walked around for a long time, and ended up at Subway (four months without Subway was just as bad as four without Starbucks).

We were still inside at about 11:55 when we realized we were about to spend midnight inside of a Subway, so we hurried out.  I saw some Rotary students that I knew so I ran ahead with them.  It was absolutely packed downtown, so we couldn't get as close to the center as we were hoping, but we were still able to enjoy the fireworks from where we were standing.

After running around for a while with Rotary students, I ran into some friends from AFS and we went to a Latin bar.  When you first walked it, it was very lively with salsa dancing all over the first floor.  Unfortunately none of us knew how to salsa dance, so we went upstairs with the younger crowd where the mainstream music played.

After about an hour at the Latin bar, Callie and Cameron called me saying they were unable to find it, so I ran out to find them and bring them back.  We stayed there for about another hour or two until people began to clear out.  It was probably around 4 AM at that point and it was freezing outside, so we ran around looking for places to go until we came across a McDonald's.  McDonald's was busy and I waited in line for a good half hour at least.  When I finally got my food, they were forcing everyone to leave so we had to eat quickly.

After McDonald's, we left back to the train station.  There was almost no one outside anymore, and the central station was packed with people waiting to catch their morning train.  We got there around 5:30 AM and my train home left at 6:37, but an hour goes by quickly when you're with the right people:)

For the full, uncensored story of my New Years Eve, please email safark@gmail.com and send me $5 via Paypal.

I didn't bring my camera to Brussels so all I had was a crappy photo of Callie, Cameron and I waiting for the morning train taken by my new iPod.

The train ride home was the worse.  I was so fatigued, all I could think about was climbing into a warm bed.  I managed to fall asleep once, and thankfully some Rotary students woke me up to make sure I didn't miss my stop.  I got home at about 8:30 AM and slept until 5:30 in the evening.

Well I'm pretty sure I start school again on Monday, so I should another four days of freedom.

Bonne année !